Advances in the operational capabilities provided by avionics and Air Traffic Control ground systems have resulted in significant reductions in minimum separation standards in oceanic and remote airspace. These reductions have enabled more flexible and thus more efficient operations in this airspace, including the continuing reduction in the use of organized track structures. In many such tracts of airspace, airlines are able to specify, prior to flight, the route on which their aircraft operate and, provided aircraft and Air Traffic Control ground facilities are suitably equipped, dynamic airborne reroute procedures can be executed. However, very little advantage has been taken of the dynamic airborne reroute procedures capability.
In order to provide the flight crew with a dynamic airborne reroute procedure flight plan, the airline's dispatcher or flight planner must satisfy a wide range of regulatory, operational, and safety requirements. Although many airlines' ground systems are capable of satisfying the requirements, the planners' associated workload per re-route per flight is very high, and additional personnel resources are required to take any degree of benefit from dynamic airborne reroute procedures. Very few airlines have been able to make the business case for provision of the additional resources based on the level of benefit available.
At present, there are few solutions available to assist airlines in making informed requests of the air traffic service provider to reduce the operational inefficiencies resulting from preparation of dynamic airborne reroutes. In dynamic airborne reroute procedures, airlines' flight planners and dispatchers utilize flight planning systems iteratively to refine an optimal route in ways that satisfy all regulatory, operational, and safety requirements. This process is time-consuming and, even if additional planners are hired to absorb the additional workload, the time taken to deliver each reroute to the at least one aircraft in flight is long, and some of the benefit is thus lost. In addition, airlines have little or no knowledge of other traffic in the airspace, and are thus unable to provide conflict-free reroutes.
Where a reroute that the aircraft crew sends to Air Traffic Control as a request for clearance results in a traffic conflict, the controller either rejects the clearance or may offer an alternative. These alternatives are inevitably less beneficial and may require the crew to send the reroute flight plan back to the airline's flight planner to validate that all requirements are still met. This triggers an iteration of the reroute planning process with additional loss of benefit.
A system and method is needed to resolve one or more of the issues associated with the current practices employed to monitor and reroute aircraft.